If you’re a YouTube user and you’ve tried to download your favorite video to watch off-line then you probably discovered a few things…

First, YouTube doesn’t give you an easy way to download a video — you can’t right-click on a link and select “Save Link As”. If you try, you’ll see the video uses Flash as a player. Of course, if you do a quick search on Google, you’ll find dozens of programs and Firefox extensions that will save video files embedded in web pages.

But this leads us to another problem. For the longest time, I used an extension called “UnPlug” which does the job most of the time, but it can only save videos to FLV (Flash Video) format. Unfortunately, most systems don’t support FLV by default. So you can either use a program like FLV Player or install a codec pack like K-Lite, which will allow you to use Windows Media Player to play the file. So all our problems are solved, right?

Not quite…what if you want to edit a video to clean it up? Well, guess what? There aren’t too many, if any, video editors that can open an FLV file. So what are the choices? We can use another program to convert an FLV to AVI, but that’s a pain! Besides the extra step, a lot of these programs aren’t free or the converted files are poorer in quality. Arrrgh!

Thankfully, I stumbled upon this program called Free Video Downloader (v.1.2) which is a great “all-in-one” solution. If you give it a link, it will download the video and convert it to 1 of 20 formats, and it’s FREE!

So the first thing you do is find a video on YouTube, right-click on the video link and select “Copy Link Location”:

Next, run Free Video Downloader, click on the “Download / convert video file…” button:

Paste in your YouTube link. It should automatically set the filename for you.

In case you didn’t know, you can download a “high quality” version of the video by appending “&fmt=18” on to the end of the link. So if your link is: “http://youtube.com/watch?v=cKAeyUS91I8″, change it to “http://youtube.com/watch?v=cKAeyUS91I8&fmt=18“. Try this in your web browser and you’ll see a link on the YouTube page that says “Watch this video in lower quality for faster playback.” That’s how you can tell if you have the high quality or not.
Next, select a file format like “AVI - High Quality (XviD 500 kbps / MP3 Stereo)” then click on the “Get / Convert” button:

When it’s finished downloading, you’ll have a high-quality video file in a standard format that you can play on your PC, iPod or PSP.

Thank you Jacek Pazera! This is awesome work!

The preview feature in Windows Explorer is neat until you need to perform file management tasks on AVI files like deleting, renaming, or moving. You’ll often get “access denied” messages if you don’t let Windows finish its scan. So to remove this annoying feature, you can run these commands from a Command Prompt (Start -> Run, type in ‘cmd’ hit enter) to remove image and media preview:

regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll
regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll

Of course, if you need to re-enable image and media preview, use these commands:

regsvr32 shimgvw.dll
regsvr32 shmedia.dll